From text to law: Islamic legal theory and the practical hermeneutics of Abū Ja ‘far Ahmad al-Tahāwī (d. 321/933)

Scholars of Islamic law point to the absence of any extant work of legal theory between the Risāla of al-Shāfi‘ī and the Fusūl of al-Jassās as a major barrier to reconstructing the history of Islamic legal thought. However, careful analysis of three major works of the Hanafī jurist al-Tahāwī, Ahkām al-Qur’ān, Sharh ma‘ānī al-āthār and Sharh mushkil al-āthār, reveals the existence of myriad brief passages elaborating questions of legal theory scattered throughout their many volumes. This study reconstructs the legal thought of al-Tahāwī as a window onto legal theory in the late 3rd/9th and early 4 th/10th centuries, a crucial period of transformation between late formative and post-formative Islamic law. It argues that al-Tahāwī’s works are not direct precursors to the genre of usūl al-fiqh, but instead represent a different, previously unrecognized, type of intellectual and literary activity. This activity, here termed practical hermeneutics, is concerned with demonstrating in detail how individually coherent rules of law may be derived from the often messy texts of revelation. The integrated reading of al-Tahāwī’s entire hermeneutical corpus uncovers several areas in which his legal thought departs quite notably from that of other jurists, suggesting that al-Tahāwī was neither as dependent on al-Shafi‘ī nor as closely related to mature usūl al-fiqh as has been suggested in previous studies. Most crucially, al-Tahāwī’s works unsettle accepted accounts of Islamic legal theory which assign varying levels of authority to a series of clearly distinguished legal sources—Qur’ān, Sunna, consensus, etc. This study demonstrates that, in contrast to both al-Shāfi‘ī and later usūlīs, al-Tahāwī’s legal thought blurs boundaries between these categories and instead rests upon an underlying binary concept of legal authority which draws a crucial distinction between knowledge that might permissibly be reached by inference, and knowledge that can only have come from revelation. The authority that al-Tahāwī grants any given source is therefore not a function of its formal characteristics, but rather the result of his own judgment about content and origins